24R1 Release Notes
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Accounting Updates
Hanging Balance Due to Unexpected Gain/Loss on Modification Entry for Schedules in Evergreen Status
In some cases, schedules entering Evergreen or modified after entering Evergreen resulted in an unexpected Gain/Loss on Modification entry, causing hanging balances on the Ledger Export. This generally has been corrected.
Note: Some symptom cases involved incorrectly recorded end-of-term events, which are outside the scope of this correction.
Additionally, testing surfaced a scenario whereby a fixed-term renewal was incorrectly entered with an effective date equal to the evergreen date even though the renewal commenced some time after the evergreen began. If your schedule meets this criterion, we recommend either editing the renewal to reflect the renewal date as the effective date for remeasurement or entering a new fixed-term renewal that spans between the beginning of Evergreen and the fixed-term renewal.
Example:
Schedule’s Original End Date: 11/30/2020
Evergreen Start Date: 12/01/2020
Fixed-Term Renewal: 12 months beginning 01/01/2022
Incorrect Effective Date selected for remeasurement of fixed-term renewal: Dec2020
Manual correction would change the Effective Date selected for remeasurement of fixed-term renewal to Jan2022
Testing also revealed that this code fix corrected other issues related to close-out entries. Progressions were detected in the following scenarios:
Early returns with a hanging balance in the ST/LT Obligation account
Early returns that incorrectly over-expensed depreciation
Disposals with a remaining balance in the Asset account
Import and UI Improvements
Balance Adjustments
A new feature related to accounting balance adjustments appears in this release. When a Balance Adjustment exists on a deal, users will see a new section on the Deal Summary tile below the Reclassify Events section. This new section will only appear when a Balance Adjustment exists. If there is no adjustment, the section will not be displayed.
The format for this section is as follows:
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"Calculated Balance for [[ACCOUNT_DESCRIPTION]] on [[ACCOUNTING_STANDARD]] adjusted {by|to} $1234.56; effective MM/DD/YYYY (will appear on reports run on as at dates on or after MM/DD/YYYY)"
Where by represents a DELTA and to represents an ABSOLUTE adjustment, as specified in the Balance Adjustment import used to capture the balance adjustment.
Note: The 'as at' date will not appear until the booking is completed. When the booking is in progress, the date will be replaced with "…Pending Booking." However, there could be instances where accounting does not apply to the deal, i.e., either because it does not constitute an adjustment or because it does not apply to the accounting classification in play. In these instances, "not applicable; has no impact on accounting" will appear in place of the 'as at' date.
Other Considerations
Multiple Account Descriptions and Adjustment Types in the same Balance Adjustment import for the same schedule will each show as a separate line in the new section with the corresponding Account Description, Accounting Standard, and Amount.
Only one date is allowed per Balance Adjustment event and will appear with the appropriate 'as at' date for report generation.
Only one Balance Adjustment event per schedule is allowed. If another Balance Adjustment is done, then it overwrites the existing one.
The Balance Adjustment now appears on the Deal History, History tile audit trail table. This event, labeled Balance Adjustment, has the date of import, the Responsible Party, and the Comment "Performed Balance Adjustment Import."
Performing another Balance Adjustment import for a schedule that already has one overwrites the existing adjustment and is considered a rollback. Rollback is the process of reversing or undoing a balance adjustment that was previously made.
The New Deal History Event, previously mentioned, will appear with a strikethrough to indicate the adjustment was replaced.
The Responsible Party and an Annotation line with the Comment "Rolled back Balance Adjustment" appears.
The Deal History Document for the Balance Adjustment (formerly named Accounting adjustment) document will be marked with "Rolled back Balance Adjustment."
With the new Comment regarding the deletion, "Balance Adjustment Rolled back on ||dd-MON-yyyy|| and cannot be edited. File retained for audit purposes."
The System Operations Console will show the events associated with Balance Adjustments on the Booking tile. Adjustments made before 24R1 will still be named Accounting adjustment.
Note: An Asset Detail Import replaces assets on a deal. Users will see a warning during the Validation step informing them to reassess the balance after import.
Modifications with Balance Adjustment
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There can only be one (1) Balance Adjustment in an entire modification chain when modifications include M00# deals.
Balance adjustments are blocked on the original parent deal in a modification relationship, regardless of whether or not the parent has an existing balance adjustment. Imports on parent deals, in general, cause issues with the related accounting.
Balance adjustments are blocked on the child deal in a modification relationship when an adjustment exists for the parent deal.
When only A00# deals are part of the modification chain, Balance Adjustments are not blocked on either side.
Note:
Remediation was applied to deals to show the new Balance Adjustment Section on the Deal Summary and the new Deal History information for existing adjustments. The recorded event in Deal History will show the Responsible Party as 'System.'
Please review the updated Balance Adjustment Import and User Interface guide.
Accounting Classifications with Expenses
The system now uses Scheduled Related Expenses linked to a lease when classifying. When expenses are entered as Scheduled Related Expenses, accounting classifications are impacted by Lease Incentives and Initial Direct Costs. These expenses are considered payments for classification and the Present Value (PV) test. The system no longer excludes these payments from the PV test, which caused some leases to be classified incorrectly.
It is important to note that this update will not change historical misclassifications caused by the issue. We assume that overrides were made when necessary.
Additional UI Changes
IBR for Modified Deals
Corrected an issue where the IBR was randomly not populating on Modification if Lessee or Geo had been changed after booking. The correct value will be used and displayed in the Modification Summary workspace if an IBR exists for the Lessee, Country & Term, or one can be interpolated.
Deal History
Fixed the "Event to Record" list sorting issue on the History tile for unbooked modification relationships that caused the list to not be in alphabetical order.
Report Submission
Fixed an issue where the pop-up that informs users that a report request was submitted was stuck in the "Submitting request…" stage. The system will give the correct processing Status.
Asset Management
Corrected an issue where assets were not displaying when an ampersand was part of the schedule number. The best practice is not to use special characters when numbering deals to avoid issues.
Reporting Improvements
Current Payment / Current Rent for Schedules with Split Allocations
For schedules whose assets contained split allocations, some reports included incorrect Current Payment or Current Rent values. Often, the reported value would drop a portion of the allocated amount. This has now been corrected so that the full value of the Current Payment or Current Rent populates.
Reports reflecting this progression include:
BU Asset Report
BYOR Portfolio (Deal Info layer)
Lease Classification
Payment Schedule
Payment Report
Transaction Report
Portfolio Transaction Report
EOT Options
EOT Pipeline
Asset Bundle
ConObs Report
Evergreen Transaction Report (to the extent the payment has been recorded in the system)
Note: During testing, we discovered one scenario that has not been corrected. The scenario included a schedule with a single asset and a 50/50 split in which the cost center was the same for both halves. Only the GL Coding Convention differed between the allocation levels. We will incorporate this correction with the upcoming Design Studio Payment Business Views/Templates.
Defunct Schedule Balances on Accounting Balance Reports
While progress was made with the 23R4 release as it relates to Defunct (Rolled back) schedules, with this release we have added an internal guardrail to ensure that expense balances created during the rollback process are properly carried to the end of the fiscal year on accounting balance reports rather than dropping off in the fiscal period in which the rollback occurred.
Deal-Level Participant Parameters on Accounting Reports
Previously, when a deal level participant (EX: BU, Lessee, Entity, etc.) was changed with an effective date equal to the lease start date in an open period, many accounting reports did not include the schedule when the specific deal level parameter was selected. This has now been corrected.
For example, BU was changed from 123 to 789 with an effective date of 12/01/2023, which was the lease start date. Dec 2023 was still an open fiscal month. A Maturity Analysis Report run with the BU parameter set to 123 or 789 did not include the schedule. Now, the schedule will appear with a BU selection of 789 but not with a BU selection of 123.
As this correction affected the tables in which the deal-level participant changes are stored, you may see progressions in operational reports as well. (EX: BU Report incorrectly showing both BU’s within the cell may now reflect only the current value).
Additionally, the Functional Ledger Export 'Entity' parameter has now been corrected to filter out only schedules assigned to the specified entity properly.
Design Studio Updates
New Account Activity Trend BV & Template!
A new business view and template have been added to the Design Studio suite. The Account Activity Trend template is built from the BVAccountActivity Business View. It is a 3-page template including the account activities for a selected time period for a specified ledger at schedule level, a summary of account activities by selected reporting period (monthly, quarterly, annually), and a parameters page. This template provides the same financial data as the Schedule Account Activity Trend report but with the option to customize the output. Please refer to the updated User Guide - Design Studio.
Preview Note: A performance enhancement is currently being finalized and will be available in Production.
Additional Data Points Available – Journal Entries Report
Two new data points have been added to the Design Studio Business View used by the Journal Entries template (BVLedgerExport). Users can drag the items into existing saved reports or the Journal Entry template while creating a new custom report.
Deal ID
Posting ID
These values function in the same manner as in the original Ledger Export. Depending on the item, it may not mirror the Ledger Export value since the value is determined by report generation.
My Reports and Client Reports Tiles
The My Reports and Client Reports tiles no longer include the New, Run, and Tools menus in the top left corner. These options did not properly reflect the available activities for these tiles.
Other Reporting Updates
Accounting RollForward-FX(CSV) Row Limitation
While the Accounting Rollforward-FX(CSV) report was updated with 23R4 to allow an option to include Opening and Closing Balances, we did not remove the guardrail that limited report output to 990k rows. The row restriction has now been removed.
Note that the status messaging that appears while the report is generating will continue to show the final row count during the time the report is actual writing to the file.
As a reminder, when scheduling the report (or selecting the ‘Email’ button functionality), the report may not be delivered via email due to email system constraints. The report will be available for export in the System Operations Console upon completion.
BYOR Portfolio Updates
The BYOR Portfolio report (Deal_Info layer) has now been updated to reflect the most recent participant value. As the BYOR Portfolio report is an operational report, it does not support AsAt reporting, including previous values of changed participants. As a reminder to clients that have Asset Owner and Asset User configured as both a deal-level and asset-level participant, changes need to be made separately in the Deal Summary (for deal-level) and Asset Management (asset-level) workspaces for the changes to be reported in the various operational reports.
This report has also been adjusted to respect the ledger selection for all 'Info' layers. The report previously did not respect the ledger selection for the "Lessee Role Info" layer.
Accounting Workbook – Schedule Number Parameter
The Schedule number field on the Accounting Workbook has been updated to stress that only a single schedule name can be entered. Likewise, this field will no longer accept either the asterisk or percent sign wildcard character (typed or pasted).
Four V2 Reports – PDF Export
The four accounting 'v2' reports have been updated to ensure columns will expand to view all included data when exporting to a PDF version.
Note: This update does not apply to the Design Studio Account Balance Trend template and Account Activity Trend template, which will be addressed in the future.
Asset Change Report & Deal Level Participant Change Reports
Text has been added in the UI for the Asset Change Report and Deal Level Participant Change Report to remind users that the Date parameters reflect the system date the change was recorded, not the effective date of change.
Post-Processing Notes
24R1 post-processing includes the following:
Recalculations:
Schedules active during the current fiscal quarter that incurred any renewal (including evergreen) or partial termination event.
Schedules not active in the current fiscal quarter with non-zero balances in a Balance Sheet account, other than Accounts Payable accounts, in or after the current fiscal year.
Accounting refreshes:
Schedules with split allocations.
Schedules rolled back in the current fiscal year.
Operational refreshes:
Schedules with a reduction in scope.
Schedules modified with one or more assets terminated at modification.
Schedules where a deal-level participant change was recorded effective on or before the lease start date and earliest AFUD.
Report Retirements
The Compliance Assets Report has been retired.
System Operations Console
Importing Tile
File Access
In this release, we added the ability to download an import file from the System Operations Console.
To download a copy of the completed import, click the orange download icon under "Action" in the row for an import. The initial import file may be downloaded as long as an import was validated and shows a Step 1. When an import succeeds, and both Step 1 and Step 2 are present, the icon is visible, and the file is downloadable from both steps.
Please keep in mind that the time it takes for the download to start depends on the file size. Users will see a pop-up letting them know that the process has begun. This informational pop-up will also be present for larger reports downloaded from the Report tile. If the system encounters trouble while downloading a file, a message will appear at the top of the workspace.
Note: The .zip file attached to a Manifest File Import will not be available for download.
Exchange Rate Post-Processing
Would you like to know if your Exchange Rate import has started to kick off the post-processing step?
You can do so by going to the System Operations Console Import tile. You will see a new row with "Post-Processing" in the Import Step column. The post-processing row is grouped with the Import Session Id for the Exchange Rate import, which caused the need for post-processing. The new row appears above the step rows for the import, and only the Start Time and End Time are shown. The End Time will show as "Running" while the processing remains active.
Note: Any post-processing actions before 23R4 will appear in the Import tile, but Start and End Times will not be actual since tracking of this process was not available before that release.
Guardrails
New Guardrail! Rebooking the Original Deal in a Modification Relationship
Users will notice a new guardrail that prevents them from rebooking the original parent deal in an M00# modification, whether they attempt to rebook via the UI or with an Asset Detail Import.
How are we preventing this?
In the Deal Historyworkspace and on theHistory tile, The "Booked Deal" option was removed from the Event to Record drop-down for a parent deal with an M00# modification.
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In the Book Deal workspace, the Book button was removed, and users will see an info message at the top of the screen for a parent deal with an M00# modification. Message: "This deal cannot be booked. It is the parent deal in a modification relationship."
When validating a Bulk Asset import, users will see an error message if a deal in the ADI is a parent deal in an M00# modification relationship. Error Message: "This deal cannot be booked. It is the parent deal in a modification relationship."
In the Deal Summary, Terms tile of a parent deal in an M00# modification relationship, any field that causes an implicit rebooking is disabled, and an info message appears at the top of the page. The Payment Schedule Calculator button is also disabled.